Despite advances in genomics in recent years, schizophrenia remains one of the most complex challenges of both genetics and neuroscience. The chromosomal abnormality 22q11 deletion syndrome, also known as DiGeorge syndrome, offers a way in, since it is one of the strongest genetic risk factors for schizophrenia.
Out of dozens of genes within the 22q11 deletion, several encode proteins found in mitochondria. A team of Emory scientists, led by cell biologist Victor Faundez, recently analyzed Read more

Larry Young

Why do scientists know more about the brain during fear than love? Behaviors such as startling and freezing in response to a fearful stimulus are rapid, vary little between subjects, and are easy to interpret. Things get messy when individuals show variability. Social behavior, like intimate partner selection and mating, has a lot of variability. To researchers willing to explore the neuroscience of love and mating, the stage is set for major discoveries.

A recent research study published in Nature from the Liu and Young laboratories at Emory and Yerkes uncovered a dynamic conversation between two brain regions during intimate behavior. The new findings in prairie voles explore the brain connections behind social connections. Read more

Different levels of a receptor for a hormone involved in social bonding may explain individual variation in offering comfort during stressful situations. Like humans, animals console each other in times of distress: monkeys hug and kiss, and prairie voles groom each other.

James Burkett, PhD

Emory postdoc James Burkett described his research on voles at a press conference on “The Neuroscience of Emotion and Social Behavior” at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego on Sunday. Here are Video (Burkett’s part is roughly from 4:50 to 9:00) and the scientific abstract.

Burkett’s presentation, on oxytocin-dependent comforting behavior in prairie voles, outlined an extension of his graduate work with Larry Young at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, which was published in Science in January 2016 and impressed oxytocin skeptic Ed Yong. Burkett, now in Gary Miller’s laboratory at Rollins School of Public Health, also masterminded a Reddit “Ask me anything” in February.

The rest of the Society for Neuroscience press release:

Previous research indicates oxytocin—a hormone that promotes social and maternal bonding—acts in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of the prairie vole brain to encourage consoling behavior. In humans, the ACC activates when people see others in pain. Some degree of personal distress motivates comforting behaviors, but too much actually makes animals (including humans, chimpanzees, and rats) less likely to offer comfort.

ScientistsÂ at New York University found that oxytocin helps to focus the brains of new mother mice on their pups’ calls — specifically acting on a region of the brain responsible for processing sound. The paper was published in NatureÂ — with a companionÂ News + Views from Liu.

NatGeoÂ blogger Ed Yong has been a critic of the “love hormone” hype surrounding oxytocin, and he and Young seem to have had a meeting of the minds on thisÂ Nature paper.

â€œThis kind of study, which gets into details and doesnâ€™t attribute fluffy psychological traits to this molecule, is exactly what we need to move the field forward,” LY tells EY.

Please head over to our sister blog eScienceCommons to learn about how two types of white-throated sparrow have differences in behavior, which are driven by a chromosomal alteration. Scientists at Emory showed that changes in the estrogen receptor gene are responsible for the behavior differences.

Oxytocin, a peptide hormone first studied for its roles in childbirth and lactation, has been a hot topic recently, partly because of excitement around the idea of using it to treat autism spectrum disorders. (There has even been a bit of a backlash.)Â Larry Young is quoted extensively in Greg Miller’sbalanced take on oxytocin in Science:

“In my view, the best benefit from stimulating the oxytocin system is going to be to combine it with a controlled behavioral therapy,” Emory’s Young says. He believes that oxytocin’s main effect is to make people more sensitive to social cues. In a therapist’s office, children could be assured of receiving positive, reinforcing social cues while under the hormone’s sway. Not so if they cheap oakley sunglasses simply take the hormone and went about their day. “Say you give it to a kid and then he goes to school and gets bullied. That’s not going to have a positive impact, and it may even make things worse,” Young says.

A better handle on the basic biology of intranasal oxytocin, such as how it enters the brain and which receptors it hits, might enable researchers to develop more effective drugs, Young adds. “If we want to move beyond this initial investigatory era and get more sophisticated and potent effects, we need to understand the mechanisms.”

Young, who is world-renowned for his work on the role of neuropeptides in regulating social behavior, uses voles to investigate the neurobiological and genetic mechanisms underlying social behavior. Using the monogamous prairie vole (vs. the promiscuous meadow vole) as a model organism, Young and his research team identified the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors as key mediators of social bonding and attachment. In addition, they are examining the consequences of social bond disruption as a model of social loss-induced depression.

This work has important implications for developing novel treatment strategies for psychiatric disorders associated with social cognitive deficits, including autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.